The accelerated adoption of smartphones, tablets and cloud computing has resulted in the rapid growth of global mobile data traffic. Projections indicate that a 26-fold increase in mobile data traffic may be expected by 2015, compared to 2010, with data traffic reaching a rate of 6.3 exabytes per month. The scaling of network capacity through deployment of additional base stations and the implementation of new technology may be of limited effectiveness in dealing with this growth since mobile data pricing tends to remain relatively flat.
One approach to this problem involves offloading of data traffic from the mobile wireless cellular network, for example a 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) or LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) network, to a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). In this scenario, a wireless mobile device, for example User Equipment (UE), which is served by a cell base station, for example an evolved Node B (eNB), may offload some or all of the data traffic to an available WLAN access point. A mechanism for monitoring the performance of this configuration is needed, however, to ensure efficient and reliable operation of the system so that the objectives of mobile data offload are achieved.
Although the following Detailed Description will proceed with reference being made to illustrative embodiments, many alternatives, modifications, and variations thereof will be apparent to those skilled in the art.